


Molasess

by briskkd



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Spoilers, The Velvet Room (Persona Series), persona 5 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 09:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17598854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briskkd/pseuds/briskkd
Summary: Isolation welcomes Akira like an old friend





	Molasess

For Akira, discarding his personas leave him wading through molasses. A slow, excruciating pain climbs its way into his tissue and marrow, staining his tendons and lungs - and fuck, he can't breathe again - before it settles in his heart, a heavy weight slowly compressing his organ. 

For Akira, discarding his personas is a personal blow, a dunk that keeps him under the longer he was bonded to them - in love with them. Matador left him with feeling nothing more than disassociation. He couldn't grasp the feeling, then, of bone-weary fatigue and the existence of a metastory as a relatively-innocent juvenile, cradled with only the uncertainty of his cognition and the spike in his pulse. 

The first time he loses Arsene his world closes in on him. The reverent whispers of said figure drowns beneath the incoming waves, the lapse in sanity and the cliff edge looming over him. Settled in a rough corner of his cognition, the velvet room's fitting desolation, his world span in a scathing tandem of red, yellow. This wasn't the Akira of the past, where overpriced therapy courtesy of his parents, compensation for emotional distance, could provide a safe space, a sense of comfort and belonging. This wasn't the Akira of the future, where empathy from a sister with severe anxiety and an educated friend who could provide steady, calm affirmations existed. Not even his antithesis, who was all too well accustomed to unhealthy coping mechanisms and overwhelming isolation, had found his place within Akira's inner circle. At that moment, the omnipresent chill of his prison felt all the more penetrating as Lavenza, unknown to even herself then, and the carcass of Igor, manipulatively apathetic, watched on. Ignorant to the consequential anxiety and recklessness and the overplayed charisma that Joker tried to emanate as compensation, a sense of irony befell Akira. The sole figures who should have been able to comprehend his dependency had been worn thin by figures supposedly bigger than the fight of the Phantom Thieves. These omniscient figures couldn't see past themselves, or their corruption, in their overly simplistic view of humans. As a King should, Akira held these thoughts too close to see, too close to even begin to comprehend. He was different, and even the fathered panic, delusion, and confusion could not overturn the rhythmic pulse of isolation. There was a drawn comfort in the lyricism of his pounding pulse, even as it tipped into yet another blur of panic. 

His blank face, with their eerily haunted eyes and startlingly soft eyelashes were statuesque and yet so humorously alive. Amongst the withering of his soul, this impression would imprint itself on the battered heart of Lavenza, amidst her growing confusion and existentialism. Six weary palaces later, Arsene's chilling hands settled their steady, comforting, safe hands on those orbs, feeling the chill of wisdom and the existing battle between his inner circle and his inner desolation. Arsene feels little had properly impacted him, surrounded by support but unable to truly draw on it amidst this greater story, this greater metanarrative as he is toyed with for the entertainment brought from retaliation against human inability. 

Then peace, not touched since the invigorating feel of Arsene first caressing his heart, befell a rebel soldier at the end of his line.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this sitting in my notes for a while and wanted to post it.
> 
> I have been editing this occasionally, as I keep noticing mistakes or poorly-expressed sentences. Hopefully, this will be the last edit I feel I need to make (08.04.19) 
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
